Meretseger Picture

I am completely snowed in at the moment and going a little stir crazy, so I decided to unpack the watercolors and experiment a bit. This one started out as a completely free-form doodle that soon evolved into something vaguely saurian. At first I thought it might be a Retrodino or even a Counterdino done in the weird, washed-out style of George Solonevich's paintings from one of my favorite childhood dinosaur books, Dinosaurs and More Dinosaurs. But as it became increasingly divergent and fantastical, I decided to make it a mythological creature. I was thinking of a cockatrice or basilisk, and the "crown" fit nicely with the "King of Serpents" mythology, but with the crocodilian head and vaguely Egyptian stylization I eventually settled on the cobra goddess Meretseger (who is actually a type of dragon called an amphiptere, according to another one of my many juvenile mythology books). What I was originally thinking of as a hooded neck, as if she's looking over her "shoulder," also bears some resemblance to a stylized mane seen in profile, so I guess it could be Ammut as well--but then I'd have to compete with Commander Salamander's version, which is only about a thousand times cooler. The crocodile-headed god Sobek is another possibility, but that just feels a little too prosaic to me. So yeah, let's just call her Meretseger, Queen of Amphipteres (hey, I just made that up!), and call that good enough.